Deferred from my job for a year, I moved to Brazil to volunteer. This is an accounting of my activities and musings while I live and explore in Brazil.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Chicken Babies

I know it is horrible because I don't even want to know the crazy ways I am saying things in Portuguese. But I really love when people say things in English that don't quite match up. Today in class we learned the word for a chick (pintinho, i think) and our professor called it a chicken baby. it was adorable.

Note: as I was typing this post I thought I might go ask Claudia if I was correct with pintinho...and the way I formulated the question in my head was "what is the word for the child of a chicken." I imagine this would have been hilarious...I can't help that I have a limited vocabulary, ok!

Classes, even aside from chicken babies, are going really well. I was moved up to the new group on Monday. It is no longer too easy - in fact it is incredibly difficult. But, I think I am improving and I think I need to have more confidence. I think I am better than I think I am...hrmmm. I am also trying to work on thinking more in Portuguese, which takes some concentration. A fun game I play is to translate whatever song is in my head...it can be pretty funny, especially when I try to sing it out loud!

The BEST part of my day happened on the subway (btw, the subway has a women only car (o carro das mulheres) at certain hours in the morning and the evening and it is pretty much awesome). I was 1 stop from mine and the man next to me looked over and asked me if Ipanema was the next station. I shook my head no and was already starting to reply when I realized that he had asked me in Portuguese and I had understood him. This caused me to trip up a little, but I managed to recover and tell him no, what the next station was, and that Ipanema was after that station. I am sure it was incredibly broken Portuguese, but I am still pretty pleased about it!

Work is going. Some things are really frustrating, but I think that is actually helping me learn to adapt to different situations.

I am still trying to run a lot, and I think it is going well - I am running faster and farther, and I really like challenging myself and coming up pleasantly surprised!

Paulo and Claudia arrived from China today, and before they did I expressly said that I we are done speaking English at home. It is REALLY hard, as even when I do understand what the heck people are talking about I usually can't form a response at all, let alone quickly enough to be part of the conversation. But, it will happen eventually, I think. I keep (and Paulo, too) having to remind Claudia and ask her again to only speak Portuguese with me. I imagine it is really frustrating for her to have to speak to me so slowly and try to understand what the heck I am saying...so I hope to improve so it is easier!

4 comments:

Chicken Baby, I love it. It's a difficult language, San and one of the biggest problems is they speak so fast, but I don't need to tell you that. You are doing it, you just don't realize how far you have come. Just go read your earlier posts. Hang in there. See you in the fall. :=) Love, G'Ma

That's it! I remember just like as if it was yesterday when I could carry a conversation but lacked the vocab. A conversation about the kitchen went a little bit like this: "...you know what is the name of the thing you cook food on top of, you know that has fire and a box you bake in it?...." YES the stove!!! Very frustrating in the sense that sometimes by the time you find the vocab word you are looking for, the conversation changed or you forgot what you wanted to say! LOL... And then for some reason there were some vocab words that just took a long time remembering! Cousin, or the son of your aunt, was one of them!!! Don't know why!? Very good Sandy! You are doing great! Parabens! Hobby